Half the reason LLVM has advanced so quickly is that it's not GPL.
And the other half is that GCC's design and implementation are so obtuse that no one can practically modify it without insider assistance. (This is the "RMS loophole" in the GPL.)
My question is, does it do away with the unit cirle and being required to no how many radians is in say 30 degrees (I believe that was PI/6 Rads). That thing was a pain in the ass to memorize.
If you thought you had to memorize that, you were very badly taught. If you know what pi is and what a radian is, it takes about a tenth of a second to see what pi/6 radians is.
Fundamentally, the unit circle is all there is to trigonometry. All that stuff about triangles, with SOHCATOAH or EIEIO or whatever people go on about, is just obfuscation.
"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male," wrote Robert Silverberg in his introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise by James Tiptree, Jr, before the person behind the pseudonym revealed herself.
Yes, German planes dropped over a million bombs in the first few months of the Blitz alone (autumn 1940). They were eventually beaten back by the RAF ("Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few") well before the V-2 was developed.
Only 1,358 V-2s were fired at London, in 1944-1945. But the V-2s, like the terrorists' bombs, arrived without warning, and there was no effective defense; they were stopped by destroying the organization that sent them.
the reason why we have disk drives is because main memory loses its contents after a power cycle.
From the 50s through the 70s, the dominant memory technology retained its contents without power. (Guess what was in the machines Unix was developed on? Hint: "core dumped".)
Disk drives (or more generally, a storage hierarchy, currently for a typical desktop computer registers -> on-chip cache -> L2 cache -> dynamic RAM -> magnetic disk -> optical disk) exist exist because of the wide differences in price and performance between different memory types.
Interesting that you mention AS/400 -- I think that Apple, instead of switching to a creaky old architecture like x86, should have switched to an AS/400-style scheme of making the underlying processor an implementation detail irrelevant to the user.
If the vendor decides to do that then they are screwing themselves out of potential sales.
I was actually thinking of one particular vendor, who might have an interest in driving x86 hardware sales soon after the last PPC hardware ships. So far I've seen no commitment to protect PPC machines from rapid obsolescence (not that a promise would stop them, but class-action lawyers gotta eat too).
The Universal Binary will work on "both" platforms
If and only if the vendor bothers to provide a PPC binary.
and the Rosetta emulation will allow for PPC software to run on Intel
That's not the issue; it's running future binaries on the hardware for sale today. No one in their right mind will buy a PPC Mac until that is assured.
The solution is straightforward: Apple needs to include an x86 emulator/translator on PPC alongside the PPC emulator on x86.
10.4 is resolution independent (but some apps are not yet, so the setting is not exposed to the user), so Apple apparently intends to support higher resolution screens in the future.
Computer Modern's italic(s) is (are) "interesting". The roman is quite close to the typeface used in the TAOCP first edition (I forgot to try to find out what it is exactly), but the italic isn't. The first edition uses conventional italics, for emphasis and in mathematics. In the TeX version (3rd edition of Vol. 1, 2nd for the 2 and 3), Knuth uses a slanted roman instead of italic for emphasis, and the italic used for math is unconventional: although the shapes are based on the originals (i.e. in the "modern" style), all the strokes are very thin, with little contrast -- like a light sans-serif.
(The Computer Modern font files I have on hand are distinctly different from this, so I'm not sure where to put the credit or blame; I don't have the TeX/Metafont books here. I assume some of the egregious flaws in the font in TAOCP 2e, like the "q", were fixed later.)
Yes, it is very well designed -- technically excellent; optical scaling, too. Unfortunately, it is a "modern" (18th/19th century; aka "Didone") typeface, in imitation of the one used in the first edition of The Art of Computer Programming, and suffers from all the faults of that low point of typographic design: extreme contrast, exaggerated round terminals and spindly affected tails, stiff vertical axis, and tiny apertures.
A friend of mine has had to send a top-o'-the-line 17" Powerbook in for service more than once. Last year, it was "lost" after repair. Just today, she found out her machine was "lost" again. Apple UK and/or their chosen courier appear to have a slight theft problem. (From here, it looks like the entire UK has a slight theft problem, but that's another story.) It might sound great to get a "free" upgrade every year or two, but she has to travel, and Apple doesn't provide loaners.
I had no idea that Smalltalk implemented the GUI on the Alto
Smalltalk implemented one of the GUIs on the Alto and its descendants. In particular, Star was not written in Smalltalk, as the article implies by describing Smalltalk and then saying "the ability to overlap windows was removed" in Star. Star -- the office suite -- didn't have overlapping windows. Smalltalk did; so did XDE, the development environment for Mesa, the programming language used to write most systems software for the Alto and successors, and so did Interlisp on the same hardware. (Star was the GUI office environment, not the hardware, which was sold with other software; mine was a Lisp machine.)
"Left mouse push fires it. Kinda crazy really. We actually asked for -- when this was brought up -- we asked for a great big red button, but they wouldn't give us one."
-- submariner describing missile launches, BBC, 20 July 2003
In fact, aren't many vector processors and GPUs structured around 128bit words already?
They're generally 4 x 32-bit. I don't know any with general-purpose operations on 128-bit words. Someone will correct me if I'm wrong (or even if I'm right, probably).
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The derby was designed as a hardhat.
And the other half is that GCC's design and implementation are so obtuse that no one can practically modify it without insider assistance. (This is the "RMS loophole" in the GPL.)
Just speculating wildly, but I wonder whether 'whiskers' from crummy RoHS-compliant lead-free solder might be causing shorts.
You forgot the one in the kitchen.
If you thought you had to memorize that, you were very badly taught. If you know what pi is and what a radian is, it takes about a tenth of a second to see what pi/6 radians is.
Fundamentally, the unit circle is all there is to trigonometry. All that stuff about triangles, with SOHCATOAH or EIEIO or whatever people go on about, is just obfuscation.
POSTGRES came after INGRES.
"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male," wrote Robert Silverberg in his introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise by James Tiptree, Jr, before the person behind the pseudonym revealed herself.
Liquid State.
Only 1,358 V-2s were fired at London, in 1944-1945. But the V-2s, like the terrorists' bombs, arrived without warning, and there was no effective defense; they were stopped by destroying the organization that sent them.
Disk drives (or more generally, a storage hierarchy, currently for a typical desktop computer registers -> on-chip cache -> L2 cache -> dynamic RAM -> magnetic disk -> optical disk) exist exist because of the wide differences in price and performance between different memory types.
In case you're not joking, Windows NT ran on PPC around 1995; MS dropped it in 1996.
Interesting that you mention AS/400 -- I think that Apple, instead of switching to a creaky old architecture like x86, should have switched to an AS/400-style scheme of making the underlying processor an implementation detail irrelevant to the user.
I was actually thinking of one particular vendor, who might have an interest in driving x86 hardware sales soon after the last PPC hardware ships. So far I've seen no commitment to protect PPC machines from rapid obsolescence (not that a promise would stop them, but class-action lawyers gotta eat too).
If and only if the vendor bothers to provide a PPC binary.
and the Rosetta emulation will allow for PPC software to run on Intel
That's not the issue; it's running future binaries on the hardware for sale today. No one in their right mind will buy a PPC Mac until that is assured.
The solution is straightforward: Apple needs to include an x86 emulator/translator on PPC alongside the PPC emulator on x86.
10.4 is resolution independent (but some apps are not yet, so the setting is not exposed to the user), so Apple apparently intends to support higher resolution screens in the future.
The i960 was pretty good. (That's why you've never heard of it.)
(The Computer Modern font files I have on hand are distinctly different from this, so I'm not sure where to put the credit or blame; I don't have the TeX/Metafont books here. I assume some of the egregious flaws in the font in TAOCP 2e, like the "q", were fixed later.)
Yes, it is very well designed -- technically excellent; optical scaling, too. Unfortunately, it is a "modern" (18th/19th century; aka "Didone") typeface, in imitation of the one used in the first edition of The Art of Computer Programming, and suffers from all the faults of that low point of typographic design: extreme contrast, exaggerated round terminals and spindly affected tails, stiff vertical axis, and tiny apertures.
Like Times. So yes, butt-ugly, but it could be worse; they could have used Computer Modern.
A friend of mine has had to send a top-o'-the-line 17" Powerbook in for service more than once. Last year, it was "lost" after repair. Just today, she found out her machine was "lost" again. Apple UK and/or their chosen courier appear to have a slight theft problem. (From here, it looks like the entire UK has a slight theft problem, but that's another story.) It might sound great to get a "free" upgrade every year or two, but she has to travel, and Apple doesn't provide loaners.
Smalltalk implemented one of the GUIs on the Alto and its descendants. In particular, Star was not written in Smalltalk, as the article implies by describing Smalltalk and then saying "the ability to overlap windows was removed" in Star. Star -- the office suite -- didn't have overlapping windows. Smalltalk did; so did XDE, the development environment for Mesa, the programming language used to write most systems software for the Alto and successors, and so did Interlisp on the same hardware. (Star was the GUI office environment, not the hardware, which was sold with other software; mine was a Lisp machine.)
Yes. In the video at archive.org (I, II), Alan Kay talks about how Sketchpad was behind PARC's GUI work and object-oriented programming.
They're generally 4 x 32-bit. I don't know any with general-purpose operations on 128-bit words. Someone will correct me if I'm wrong (or even if I'm right, probably).